Brew Views: The Master

Paging Tom Cruise.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is the
film Scientology maybe doesn’t want you to see. But while it makes
deliberate allusions to L. Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi pseudo-religion, that’s
not what it’s actually about. For the first 30 minutes, we’re
alone with Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell. In that time, he mimes
intercourse with a female-shaped sand sculpture, then masturbates into
the ocean; undergoes a Rorschach test in which he reports seeing only
genitalia; and attempts to choke a customer at his postwar job as a mall
photographer. Stowing away on a boat, Quell eventually encounters
Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a pink-hued huckster selling
salvation through “the Cause,” a self-help movement based on a variation
of repressed-memory therapy. It’s here that Anderson drops in bits of
Hubbard’s biography. But as Quell and Dodd become increasingly
intertwined, the Scientology allegories fade into the background.
Abetted by grandiose 65 mm cinematography and a crazy-making score from
Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, The Master is an ambitious enigma
that never figures itself out, and that’s precisely what made it one of
2012’s best films.